Data analytics - Is it industrial engineering reborn?

The emerging field of data analytics (DA) has attracted the attention of academia and industry over the past years. Its promise of creating competitive advantage from data is appealing to all vital sectors of the economy, and its focus on data processing and information extraction is reviving classical techniques in statistics, operations research and computer science. Hence, DA is considered by some as a new discipline and by others as a modernised packaging of known techniques in light of recent advances in information and computer technology. In this work, the authors endeavour to unveil the links between the traditional field of industrial engineering (IE) and the emerging field of DA in an attempt to identify the boundaries of each and their implications on the training, education and curriculum development in IE. Based on the literature and on the analysis of leading IE programmes, the authors find that DA is a building block of traditional and modern IE programmes, albeit varying emphasis on the techniques presented and the application areas studied. As such, it is a field that has most links with IE as opposed to statistics or computer science, which tend to focus more on data science (DS) than DA. In the future, and as the focus of IE on service and data increases, the authors foresee an even closer integration between IE and DA in curricula, application domains and job prospects.